At first glance, Florida's Amendment 1 looks sunny for solar power. If it passes on Tuesday with 60 percent of the vote, the measure would give Floridians a constitutional right to a solar panel. ... But Floridians can already own solar panels. Buried in the second sentence, if you bother to read past the right to a solar panel, you'll find the real purpose of the measure: a provision that could end "net metering," which allows solar panel owners to sell excess power back to their utility on hot summer days. This change would vastly reduce the incentive to own or lease solar panels. A similar initiative in Nevada this winter "brought rooftop solar to a dead stop" in the state. read more

One of the most demonized patients in history, Gaetan Dugas, has been cleared of claims he first spread HIV to the U.S. A new study published in the journal Nature based on blood collected for hepatitis trials showed he was just one of thousands of infected people in the 1970s. Richard McKay, a science historian at the University of Cambridge, said: "Gaetan Dugas is ... one of a long line of individuals and groups vilified in the belief that they somehow fueled epidemics with malicious intent." The Air Canada employee who died in 1984 was labelled Patient O by the Centers for Disease Control because he was a case "Out of California." Over time the O became a 0 and the term Patient Zero was born.

The Republican nominee, who has called for a rapprochement with Russia in order to jointly combart ISIS, argued that his Democratic rival's calls for taking a more aggressive posture in Syria to bring the conflict there to an end and combat ISIS will only draw the US into a larger war.

A U.S. Navy guided-missile destroyer, the USS Decatur, sailed through the South China Sea on Friday in a freedom of navigation operation intended to send a blunt message to China. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said the point was to let China know that it cannot "unlawfully restrict the navigation rights, freedoms and lawful uses of the sea that the United States and all states are entitled to exercise under international law."

Over the course of the 2016 election, CNN hired four Trump supporters -- Kayleigh McEnany, Scottie Nell Hughes, Jeffrey Lord, and Corey Lewandowski -- to act as full-time Trump surrogates and defend their candidate on-air. CNN has defended its hirings by suggesting that surrogates like Lewandowski are needed to provide "balance," especially after several of CNN's traditional Republican commentators expressed their opposition to the GOP presidential nominee.
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This isn't entirely the fault of the professional Trump surrogates. CNN pays them to be Trump apologists; their jobs depend on them defending their candidate regardless of how ridiculous it makes them sound. In other words, the network incentivizes them to be intractable.